Messina

Also Messina plays an important role in the determination of Beatrice’s personality. Shakespeare consciously set many of his play in Italy, in order to escape from censorship: it was easier to get away with debauchery when it took place in Italy. Furthermore, it had strong connotations for the Elizabethan audience: Italy was an exotic, steamy, sinful and yet splendid society with volatile, vain and cunning inhabitants. In such a setting, things could happen that just would have been impossible in Elizabethan England. Elizabethan women did not have many rights other than the ones that their male family members and husbands granted them. Their upper goal was being a skilled housewife and providing her husband with an offspring. As the protestant leader John Knox pointed out so effectively, a ‘[w]oman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man.’

The enormous difference between Beatrice’s conduct and the expectations set upon Elizabethan women made her an extraordinarily intriguing character, not only for Shakespeare’s contemporaries. When Claudio accuses her niece Hero of being promiscuous, Beatrice shouts: “O that I were a man for his sake!’, seethed by the unequal status of women. (IV, i. 313)